I'm a writer. But there are zillions of writers. Here's some of my stuff.

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There was this drop dead gorgeous paralegal who’d worked in the office. This was years ago. We were on opposite sides of the building. Only ran into her occasionally. She was a knock out, though, her father German, her mother Vietnamese, and the results were striking, the best of both. She was friendly enough but business-like, almost icy, and I never talked to her much. One time, though, we were talking and she was rubbing her fingers over little spots on her arm and neck. Little red spots, lots of them, like tiny little burn marks. She said they stung. I asked if they were insect bites, imagining a cloud of black flies or mosquitoes. She laughed. Said they were burns. Burns? They really are burn marks? Yeah, she grinned, from candle wax. Candle wax? Yeah, she said. Her date last night had dripped hot scented candle wax all over her body. I must have blinked. Blinked again. It was fun, she said. I said I’m sure it was. She smiled. I had no idea what to say next. Then her phone rang. Gotta run, she said. As I walked off a lady a couple desks down asked me what the paralegal had said the marks were. Apparently everyone was wondering, but no one had the nerve to ask. Bites, I said. Black flies. Black flies? Really? Yeah, I lied, she’d been camping. That’s too bad, the lady said, I could have sworn they were from hot dripping candle wax. Black fly bites look like candle wax burns, I said. It’s easy to get them confused. I bet, she said, I bet it’s real easy.

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My latest writing at: Brick's Picks

Eddie Money was punk rock to me. Or was that Meat Loaf. Yeah, Meat Loaf. Eddie Money was Meat Loaf to me, but also punk rock. No, that was the Ramones. The Ramones were punk rock to me, Eddie Money was Meat Loaf to me, and Meat Loaf was, I dunno, maybe Pat Benatar. Anyway, […]

“Look! I don’t like to get pushed around! I don’t like people I like to be pushed around! I don’t like anybody to get pushed around!” That was Sam Masterson, played by Van Heflin at his peak, in the noir classic The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). It’s a startling, electrifying line for a […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

Trump’s endlessly bizarre behavior at G7 makes perfect sense if he has Alzheimer’s. He didn’t lie about those calls from China. He thought they had occurred. I wonder how often this is happening. My guess is daily. Soon he’ll be seeing people who are not there. He’s not making sense because he is descending into […]

Letting Mueller play himself at the hearing was a terrible idea. George Clooney would have been a much better Robert Mueller. It’s all about the optics. Imagine Watergate without Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. WoodStein as WoodStein? Seriously? Nixon would still be President.

My latest writing at: Brick's History

[Found this forgotten in the drafts folder from 2018.] Was at Ralphs and checked out the poor people veggie bin and there were three big bundles of potatoes at 99 cents each. My Irish German heart was set aflutter and I bought all three and once home dropped them into the tuber bag with the […]

I haven’t seen this pointed out yet, but the reason that prime minister Boris Johnson was able to suspend Parliament legally is because Great Britain is a monarchy. It’s a parliamentary monarchy, sure, but it is first and foremost a monarchy and if the monarch says sure, suspend parliament, then that is the law. The […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Science

If you aren’t doing so already you might wanna set yourself up a WordPress blog (they’re free, but your own domain will cost $18/yr, about three slices of the San Francisco pizza you posted so eloquently about) and after you spill your essays onto Facebook you can cut and paste them onto your blog. Instant […]

If the birth control pill hadn’t been invented the year I was born think of how many more of you there would be. Look around. Double the numbers of middle aged people you see. Quadruple the number of twenty somethings. Octuple the children. The pill took care of that excess. Incidentally, the peak year for […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Brain

Not going to delete the blogs, tho’ I’d love to. It’s not the solution, tho’ it seemed like a great terrible idea at the time. Seriously, I was all ready to get rid of 90% of everything I’d ever written to reduce clutter. How’s that for a revolutionary act? The Pol Pol approach to website […]

As part of my excruciatingly dull mellow epileptic lifestyle I had to cut off contact with some people who, through no fault of their own, were really bad for my epilepsy. Just too intense, too volatile. I never told them. I just sort of slipped away. Now I’m having to do the same on Facebook, […]